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Here is a compilation of essays on ‘Adolescence’ for class 11 and 12. Find paragraphs, long and short essays on ‘Adolescence’ especially written for school and college students.
Essay on Adolescence
Essay Contents:
- Essay on the Meaning of Adolescence
- Essay on the Historical Perspectives of Adolescence
- Essay on the Developmental Model in Adolescence
- Essay on the Factors Influencing Development During Adolescence
- Essay on Developmental Psychopathology during the Period of Adolescence
Essay # 1. Meaning of Adolescence:
Adolescence is a time of rapid physiological and psychological change of intensive readjustment to the family, school, work and social life and of preparation for adult roles.
It starts with puberty and ends with the achievement of an adult work role. It usually begins between 11 and 16 years in boys and between 9 and 16 years in girls. Websters’ dictionary (1977) defines adolescence the ‘process of growing up’ or the ‘period of life from puberty to maturity’. Adolescence has been associated with an age span, varying from 10-13 as the starting age and 19-21 as the concluding age, depending on whose definition is being applied.
Essay # 2. Historical Perspectives of Adolescence:
The concept of adolescence was formally inducted in psychology from 1880. The definitive description of adolescence was given in the two volume work of Stanley Hall in 1904. Hall described adolescence as a period both of upheaval, suffering, passion and rebellion against adult authority and of physical, intellectual and social change.
Anna Freud, Mohr and Despres and Bios have independently affirmed adolescent regression, psychological upheaval, and turbulence as intrinsic to normal adolescence development. Margaret Mead believed adolescence as a ‘cultural invention’.
Albert Bandura said that children and adolescents imitate the behaviour of others especially influential adults ‘entertainment’ heroes and peers. Erikson elaborated the classic psychoanalytic views shifting the emphasis from biological imperatives of the entry into adolescence to focus on psychological challenges in making the transition from adolescence to adulthood (developmental model discussed below).
Piaget proposed a theory of cognitive development describing four major stages in intellectual development. Puberty is a universal process involving dramatic changes in size, shape and appearance. Tanner has described bodily changes of puberty into five stages. The enumeration of Tanner stages is given in Table 28.1.
The relationships between pubertal maturation and psychological development can be considered in two broad models,
(a) The ‘Direct Effect Model’ in which certain psychological effects are directly result of physiological sources,
(b) ‘Mediated Effects Model’ which proposes that the psychological effects of puberty are mediated by complex relations of intervening variables (such as the level of ego development) or are moderated by contexual factors (such as the socio-cultural and socialization practices). In recent days, this model is more favoured.
Essay # 3. Developmental Model in Adolescence:
Developmental theories of adolescence are:
(a) Cognitive development:
Jean Piaget described four distinct stages in the cognitive development from birth to adolescence.
(i) Sensory-motor stage:
Sensory-motor stage (from birth to 18 months) wherein the child acquires numerous basic skills with limited intellectual capacity and is primitive.
(ii) Preoperational or intuitive stage:
Preoperational or intuitive stage roughly starting at about 18 months and ending at 7 years, wherein the child learns to communicate and uses reason in an efficient way. However, he is still inclined to intuition rather than thinking out systematically.
(iii) Concrete-operations stage:
Concrete-operations stage (from 7 to 12 years) where the child becomes capable of appreciating the constancies and develops the concept of volume but thinking is still limited in some respects.
(iv) Formal operations stage:
Formal operations stage, (from 12 years through adulthood) in which the child develops the ability to ponder and deliberate on various alternatives, and begins to approach the problem situation in a truly systematic manner.
(b) Psychosocial development:
‘Identity’ and its precedents in development are the backbone of Erikson’s psychological developmental theory. Erikson’s theory is basically an amplification of Freud’s classical psychoanalytic theory of human development. However, Erikson lays more stress on the social than the biological features in the process of development. This theory is more humanistic and optimistic, and emphasizes the importance of ‘ego’ rather than ‘id’.
Erikson postulated eight stages of development, placing more importance on adolescence (Table 28.2).
His concept of identity crises has been recognised in all the countries faced with racial, national, personal and professional problems.
Psychodynamic Model:
Recent psychodynamic model focuses on adolescent development under various dimensions
Learning Model:
Learning theory has long played an important role in understanding of human behaviour. Three major learning paradigms are: classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and observational learning. The concepts of generalization and discrimination illustrate how learning theory can account for individuality of response styles and behaviour.
Phenomenological Model:
There are different schools of approach, including the phenomenological one.
Developmental Phases of Adolescence:
I. Early Adolescence:
Early adolescence is probably the most stressful of all developmental transitions. It is generally acknowledged that within the years of age from 11 to 15, a period of rapid and drastic biological change will be experienced.
The dominant themes of early adolescence are related to the endocrine changes of puberty. There are biological changes in virtually every system of the body, including height, facial contours, fat distribution, muscular development, mood changes, and energy levels.
Early adolescence is a time of sharpest possible discontinuity with the past.
There are two major psychosocial challenges that confront early adolescents:
(1) the transition from elementary to junior high school and
(2) the shift in role status from child to adolescent.
A useful distinction has been made between “hot” and “cold” cognitions. Hot cognitions are those that are highly charged with emotion and are involved in matters of perceived threat or in situations in which cherished goals or values are in conflict or jeopardy.
There is preoccupation with body image, with deep concerns about the normality, attractiveness, and vulnerability of the changing body. Superimposed are the challenges of entry into the new social world of the high school that pose new academic and personal challenges, especially regarding friendships. The early adolescents begin to search for new behaviours, values, and reference persons and to renegotiate relationships with parents. At this time they are particularly receptive to new ideas and risk taking.
II. Middle Adolescence:
It generally encompasses the ages 15 to 17.
The middle adolescents are capable of generalizations, abstract thinking and useful introspections that can be linked to experience. As a result there is less response simply to the novel, exotic, or contradictory aspects of the environment.
The anxious bodily preoccupations of early adolescence have greatly diminished. The power of peer pressure is lessened and more differentiated judgments can now be exercised in seeking and establishing close friendship ties.
The provocative rebelliousness of the early adolescent is no longer prominent. The middle adolescent is beginning to orient more to the larger society and to learn about and to question the workings of society, politics, and government.
III. Late Adolescence:
The ages represented are 17 years through the early 20s. It represents a definitive working through of the recurrent themes of body image, autonomy, achievement, intimacy, and sense of self that, when integrated, come to embody the sense of identity.
Although there may not be a work commitment, it is a time of thoughtful educational and vocational choices that will lead to eventual economic viability. The challenge of intimacy and the establishment of a stable, mature, committed intimate relationship is perceived as critical challenge.
Essay # 4. Factors Influencing Development during Adolescence:
I. Genetic Factors:
Leaving aside major diseases clearly transmitted by genes, such as Huntington’s chorea.
Genetic influences in psychiatry are characterised by:
(a) the inheritance of traits or tendencies rather than specific abnormalities,
(b) polygenic inheritance, that is to say more than one gene being influential,
(c) the concept of threshold effects (i.e., the presence of particular genes does not mean that the characteristic they represent will be exhibited).
II. Neurological Factors:
Brain Damage:
Various degrees of injury to the brain.
Mental Retardation:
Various degrees of intellectual deficit and general mental handicap.
Epilepsy:
This may or may not be associated with brain damage, mental handicap and psychiatric problems.
Neurological disorder:
Brain disorder, including neurodegenerative disorders.
III. Constitutional and Temperamental Factors:
If by personality, it is meant that more or less characteristic, coherent and enduring set of ways of thinking and behaving that develop through childhood and adolescence, then by constitution it means those inherited (genetic) and acquired physiological qualities that underlie personality.
IV. Family and Social Influences:
(a) Attachment, separation and loss:
Early experience of disrupted or discordant family relationships, or lack of parental affection, increases the incidence of emotional and personality problems later.
(b) Parental care and control:
It is the extremes of parental behaviour, e.g. excessive permissiveness, negligence, over-protectiveness and rigid discipline which tend to be associated with many of the problems in child and adolescent development.
The parental behaviours often associated with adolescent disturbance, and which when modified can help put things right include:
1. Lack of confidence about being adult and weakness at limit-setting;
2. Parental and marital distress;
3. Inability to provide the model of a reasonably competent adult who enjoys life;
4. Difficulty in maintaining appropriate roles and boundaries;
5. Difficulty in getting the balance right between being too protective and intrusive on the one hand or negligent and uninterested on the other;
6. Giving in too readily to adolescent demands, on the one hand, or not listening to the adolescent’s point of view on the other;
7. Becoming so upset by adolescent demands that the parent becomes childishly angry and vulnerable.
(c) Parental mental disorder:
In clinical practice, parental mental illness can have impact in three main ways:
(1) When it has been a feature of family life and interacting with the child’s problems for several years past;
(2) When it interferes with the developmental tasks of adolescence, for example when a depressed parent is thereby too vulnerable to the adolescent’s challenges; and
(3) When it interferes with treatment.
(d) Parental criminal behaviour
There is a strong association between delinquency in the child and criminality in the parent, and where both parents are criminal, the association is even stronger.
Again, poor parenting skills and family discord may be important linking factors. Modelling may be another factor.
(e) Family size and structure:
Children from large families (more than 5 children) tend to show a greater incidence of conduct problems, delinquency, lower verbal intelligence and lower reading attainment.
(f) Family patterns of behaviour:
Confused or conflicting communication in families, problems in resolving arguments or making decisions, and the generation of high levels of tension do seem to be associated with child disturbance in general.
(g) Adoption, fostering and institutional care:
There is an increased rate of psychiatric disorder among adopted children, with conduct disorder among adopted boys being most prominent.
Institutional care, the placement of children and adolescents in children’s homes, is associated with a higher rate of disturbance than in the general population.
(h) The effects of schools:
Wolkind and Rutter have listed features of schools which have a positive effect on their pupils: high expectations for work and behaviour; good models of behaviour from teachers; respect for the children, with opportunities for them to take responsibilities in the school; good discipline, with appropriate praise and encouragement and sparing use of punishment; a pleasant working environment with good teacher-pupil relationships; and a good organizational structure that enables staff to work together with agreed academic and other goals.
(i) Social and transcultural influences:
Life in inner city areas seems in general to increase the rate of behaviour problems compared with small towns and rural areas. Similar influences, plus and effects on the family of immigration and unemployment and prejudice affect adolescents. Unemployment among adolescents is associated with an increase in psychiatric problems.
The effects of film and television violence have now being widely studied. There seems to be a modelling and imitative effect, particularly in younger children and among adolescents who already show conduct problems and delinquency.
Assessment:
Assessment in adolescent psychiatry requires a far wider appraisal of who is concerned about what, and who is in a position to help, than the traditional clinical diagnosis can possibly provide. See Table 28.3.
Prevalence of Disorders in the Community:
The prevalence of adolescent disorder in the community varies from place to place and with age, and depends on the criteria used. The figures given vary between around 10 and 25%. The lower end of the range is associated with younger adolescents with recognised (i.e., known to adults) psychiatric problem in more rural or sub-urban areas, and the upper figures are associated with older adolescents, with industrial and inner-city areas and with the inclusion of problems not so evident to parents and teachers.
Disorders seen in clinical practice:
Table 28.4 is a composite picture of the types of disorder likely to be seen in general psychiatric service for adolescents, and is based on data drawn from several accounts.
(a) Clinical diagnostic categories (in approximate order of frequency):
Mood disorders:
Emotional or mixed emotional/ contact disorders, or adult-type anxiety or depressive disorders, including obsessive compulsive phobic state.
Conduct Disorders:
Hysterical disorders e.g., with paralysis and serious self-neglect.
Problems of personality development with mood and/or conduct problems, including ‘borderline’ and schizoid personality disorders, and problems of sexual identity.
Schizophrenic, Schizoaffective and affective (manic-depressive) psychoses.
Brain disorder, including epilepsy, and neurodegenerative disorder.
Anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa, enuresis, encopresis, and tics
Autism
(b) Changes in prevalence with age and sex:
The overall pattern seems to be a gradually increasing prevalence of psychiatric disorder from around 10% in children through 10 to 15% in mid- adolescence to around 20% in adulthood although some studies report a peak of about 20% being reached in adolescence.
In adolescence, enuresis and encopresis are less common than in earlier childhood. Hyperactivity presents less often, but children who have been hyperactive in earlier childhood sometimes present in adolescence with behavioural and other social problems.
In earlier childhood, equal numbers of girls and boys are affected by emotional disorders. In adolescence, however, as in adult life, more girls than boys are affected.
Delinquency increases markedly in adolescence and declines from early adulthood onwards.
Essay # 5. Developmental Psychopathology during the Period of Adolescence:
(a) Mood Fluctuations and Misery:
The general observation that adolescents experience a greater fluctuation of mood that adults has been demonstrated rather consistently. The feelings of transient misery and sadness reported by adolescents can be explained by several bases.
The Offer Self-image Questionnaire, administered to thousands of adolescents from 1962-1980, showed a significant upward shift of scores of depressive mood from the 1960’s to the 1970’s for both boys and girls.
Although relationships with parents may remain intact, the security experienced by identifying with the idealized parental image is sacrificed as the youth moves toward development of a separate identity.
Eventually, with the synthesis of these different value systems, the adolescent’s behaviour takes on an increasingly external and internal consistency. The wide array of conflicting societal values in regard to a youth’s engaging in sex becoming pregnant, having an abortion, bearing a child, or participating in homosexual behaviour provides numerous opportunities for remorse.
An additional factor that may draw the adolescent to a sexual relationship inspite of conflicting values is the relative emotional void produced as some distance is gained from the parent.
Among the adolescents these kinds of temporary setbacks may lead to an array of behaviours that erroneously have been termed clinical depression. These include a hypersensitivity and irritability, with a proneness to overreact to criticism. At times the adolescent may “tune out” temporarily and withdraw into a position of apathy and indifference.
At times there is a propensity to move from a passive to an active position in response to feelings of helplessness, and the adolescent may take provocative positions that elicit a punitive response from his environment. This punishment may provide a welcome relief from an immature harsh superego. For many clinicians such behaviour is summarised as adolescent turmoil.
However, the steeply rising suicide rates and the high prevalence of true adolescent depression is particularly poignant and of deep concern. It is estimated that there are 100 suicide attempts for every completed suicide. Surveys reveal that 8% to 10% of all adolescents report suicidal feelings.
(b) Sexual and Adolescent Pregnancy:
The recent significant rise in level of sexual activity among adolescents and the trend toward increasingly younger ages of initiation is well documented.
Clear documentation exists as to the biological and psychosocial risk to both mother and child in adolescent pregnancy, birth, and motherhood. The obstetrics complications, high rates of infant mortality, and perinatal morbidity have been well described. Similarly, there is excellent documentation for the social isolation, inadequate parenting skills, school drop-outs, repeat pregnancy, and chronic poverty that characterises these mothers.
(c) Developmental Issues in Drug Abuse:
If the drugs are used as a way to avoid tension and if this is done chronically, the youth’s capacity to tolerate tension and to gain in ego strength by working through stressful situations will be under developed. Drugs may thus have long term effects on important areas of ego functioning that are ordinarily developed during adolescence.
The problem behaviours of youth that are highly interrelated with regular drug use include delinquency, alcoholism, decreased school motivation and achievement, drug abuse and teenage pregnancy.
The factors associated with drug abuse can be divided into three categories:
(1) Personality factors;
(2) Social or interpersonal factors; and
(3) Sociocultural or Environmental factors.
Personal factors include an emphasis on unconventionality, rebelliousness, high risk taking, low value on achievement, and high value on autonomy. Social or interpersonal factors include alienation from parents, high influence from peers involved in problem behaviours, and little involvement in religious activities. Sociocultural factors include low social controls, disorganized environment and permissive values.
(d) Impact of Chronic Illness on Development:
During puberty, chronic illness of childhood is re-experienced as a distinct and significant adolescent phenomenon. With the major bodily changes of early adolescence and the concomitant free occupation with body image a long term illness is repraised and becomes a threat to body integrity and self-concept.
During a period typically characterized by developmental urges toward independence, the stress of illness can led to exaggerated wishes for dependence, security and nurturance on the one hand or led to denial and hyper independent, rebellious and non-compliant risk taking behaviour on the other hand. Overprotectiveness of concerned parents can aggravate any or all of these conflicts. Chronic illness may actually delay the onset of puberty.
(e) Parent-adolescent estrangement and social alienation:
Hostility and conflict with parents or substitute caregivers is a frequent presenting feature of adolescent disturbance. Parents may complain about the adolescent’s expressions of anger and defiance of unmanageable behaviour. Angry outbursts and temper tantrums occur frequently in young adolescents coping for the first time with biological changes and increasing academic and family responsibilities.
Psychiatrically disturbed adolescents, however, are likely to be involved in chronic conflict with parents who, in turn, may display psychopathology in relationships with their children, marital discord or personal psychiatric disorder.
Conflict and defiance may extend to such a serious level that there is a complete breakdown of trust and communication with parents.
(f) Anti-authority and antisocial behaviour:
Antisocial behaviour in adolescents may have arisen initially in this age-period or have continued from childhood.
Shoplifting, vandalizing public property, or spraying graffiti may occur transiently in groups of discontended teenagers who are not established delinquents.
(g) Problems in School:
The most common manifestations of adolescent disturbance in school are: disenchantment with conventional education often leading to truancy and showing other evidence of antisocial activity and conduct disorder. School refusal, usually associated with other signs of emotional disorder. Academic problems including examination anxiety, difficulties with study and academic under achievement; and disruptive behaviour, with negative attitudes towards the staff, conformity problems, bullying and association with delinquent peers.
Therapeutic Approach to Adolescent Disturbance:
Although there may be little scope or necessity for active psychiatric treatment, systematic management of interpersonal, social, educational, legal and ethical problems may be necessary and can be challenging and time consuming. These aspects of management call for full multi-disciplinary teamwork, consultation with other professionals and carefully integrated planning.
Hospitalisation and Residential Care:
Great care needs to be exercised in using residential resources, in view of the implications for adolescents of separation from home and the limited nature of residential provisions.
Psychiatric in-patient hospital treatment:
Steinberg et al have distinguished six needs to related to requests for admission, comprising the need for further work to be done with adults already involved for detailed educational reappraisal, for proper care and control, for physical containment, for an emergency safe place, for psychiatric assessment and treatment.
The role of the multidisciplinary staff and their deployment in treatment should be directed towards vigorous, short-term intervention minimizing the problems of institutionalization.
Non-psychiatric residential care of adolescents:
Disturbed adolescents may be placed in a miscellany of settings in addition to facilities administered by the National Health Service, including: schools and units for maladjusted children; independent boarding schools; children’s homes run by social service and voluntary agencies; observation and assessment centers; community homes with education, remand homes, detention centers, and borstals.
Therapeutic Work with Adolescents:
Apart from the use of antidepressant drugs in carefully selected cases of depressive disorder, the occasional use of lithium in affective psychoses and major tranquillizers in psychotic states, most adolescent disturbances can be managed without psychotropic medication.
Acute disturbance as part of personality disorder or other nonpsychotic states may warrant the use of major tranquillizers at the time of crisis, but they should not be relied upon for long term behavioural control. Hypnotics and minor tranquillizers of the Benzodiazepine group are rarely indicated and particular caution should be exercised in their prescription, in view of the scale of self- poisoning in adolescents.
The most frequent forms of individual intervention are psychotherapeutic, including behavioural techniques.
Supportive counselling, with an explicit educational component, may be indicated in the treatment.
Parental and family work:
Some form of specific work with the parents or families of disturbed adolescents is usually required and it may be an advantage to allocate a therapist to work chiefly with them.
Most adolescents are likely to accept that family sessions are an appropriate medium for dealing with issues that are public in the sense, that they impinge on all family members.
School liaison:
Information from the school or school psychological service may be essential in assessment and planned liaison about aspects of management may be useful therapeutically, as well as providing a way of monitoring progress.
Legal Aspects of Care and Community Services:
The adolescent psychiatrist needs to be familiar with all the legislation that affects adolescent patient care. In particular, it is important to be aware of the various forms of disposal for young offenders.